Books, Arts & Manners: The Sex Wars

Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, by Nadine Strossen (Scribner’s, 320 pp., $22)

SEXUAL liberals live in a special universe all their own. Take Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union and self-proclaimed defender of pornography, a/k/a “sexual expression.” In Nadine Strossen’s America, a conspiracy of right-wing fundamentalists and anti-porn feminists poses “an unprecedented danger to sexual expression”; Nadine Strossen’s America is in the middle of “a full-fledged sex panic” in which artists, intellectuals, and women “are increasingly deterred” from fully exploring their own and other people’s sexuality in words, pictures, and perhaps even deeds. In Nadine Strossen’s America any attempt to exercise taste, prudence, or (ACLU forbid!) moral judgment in sexual matters is frightening evidence of the omnipresent sex “repression” that First Amendment fighters like her are only just holding at bay.

About the Author

Maggie Gallagher

Maggie Gallagher is the author of four books on marriage and is a longtime contributor to National Review.

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Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, by Nadine Strossen (Scribner’s, 320 pp., $22)

SEXUAL liberals live in a special universe all their own. Take Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union and self-proclaimed defender of pornography, a/k/a “sexual expression.” In Nadine Strossen’s America, a conspiracy of right-wing fundamentalists and anti-porn feminists poses “an unprecedented danger to sexual expression”; Nadine Strossen’s America is in the middle of “a full-fledged sex panic” in which artists, intellectuals, and women “are increasingly deterred” from fully exploring their own and other people’s sexuality in words, pictures, and perhaps even deeds. In Nadine Strossen’s America any attempt to exercise taste, prudence, or (ACLU forbid!) moral judgment in sexual matters is frightening evidence of the omnipresent sex “repression” that First Amendment fighters like her are only just holding at bay.